Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 February 1914 — DENIES THEORY OF LOMBROSO [ARTICLE]

DENIES THEORY OF LOMBROSO

Equally High Authority Asserts That There Is No Distinct Type of, Criminal. Dr. Charles Goring is the lateht criminologist to combat the theories of Lombroso and to assert that there is no such thing as a criminal type. Dr. Goring admits that there are some persons who are naturally criminals, but he denies that their criminality shows itself by physical stigmata. Seeing that criminality is a purely artificial distinction, it is hard to understand why nature should aid in the classification. Our social system has seen fit to select a small number of the almost innumerable ways of being wicked and to label'them as criminal. The other ways are not labeled as critpirial, although they may actually involve a much greater moral turpitude. It is not the function of society to prevent people from being wicked, but only to prevent them from being wicked in such ways as are particularly perjudicial to the rest of the community. There was a time when it was criminal to read the Bible. It is still criminal to do some things of which the moral sense may highly approve. We can hardly expect nature to give her sanction to our artificial distinctions.